


waves are coming miles and miles (bringing only empty boats)

by labime



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Aunt/Nephew Incest, Canon Compliant, Episode Tag, F/M, Grief/Mourning, R Plus L Equals J, Season/Series 08, Set After Episode: s8e04 and Before Episode: s8e05, jon learns about missandei's death, trying to making sense of the characterization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-02 05:32:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18804721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labime/pseuds/labime
Summary: Jon reads the short, curt message thrice before he rolls the paper in his tight fist, questions and worries twisting in his chest. Another dead dragon. Another dead child. Another dead friend. Another failure.





	waves are coming miles and miles (bringing only empty boats)

**Author's Note:**

> i've accepted the direction the show is taking definitely isn't what i wanted—and makes no sense, in my opinion—but i at least want a scene between jon and daenerys before everything go down in flames—literally—and i don't think we're getting one. actually i don't think we will even get an insight into daenerys' characterization, either, so i wrote it myself.

It is a raven that comes bearing the news of the blazing defeat.

Jon reads the short, curt message thrice before he rolls the paper in his tight fist, questions and worries twisting in his chest.

Another dead dragon. Another dead child. Another dead friend. Another failure.

 

 

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The night has smeared a dark shade of blue upon the starless sky when Jon reaches Dragonstone. Drogon's shrieks of grief fills it with the scent of charred breath, the massive shadow of his wings flailing as he turns and twists and flies higher until there is no trace of him that eyes can discern, strident laments dwindling slowly, and the only solid proof of his passage remains a ring of dust that gradually settles down.

They remain in an enclosure of silence, him and his men, motionless as they wait. A bristling breeze grazes him, sand, dried leaves, and the flimsiest shroud of pebbles hitting his face. The lack of sounds, of movements, is unsettling, an austere impression of mourning seeping out from the ancient stones, from the frozen castle. It reminds him of burials. It reminds him of rotting corpses and fallen warriors, and the nauseating odor he knows too well for having felt it latch at the back of his throat. But there are no dead or graves this time.

Soldiers come and greet them, lead by Lord Tyrion. He looks agitated, worried, almost apprehensive as they walk. He wants to tell him something, Jon understands, slowing down as the imp grabs his arm and tugs. He pulls him aside, lowers his voice and swallows.

“The queen gives me cause for concern,” he says. “She hasn’t been herself since the last defeat,” he says. “She is furious. She wants revenge. I’m am afraid her plans are—,” Lord Tyrion pauses, not out of dramatic flair but genuine hesitancy, seemingly caught in a battle with himself, “—immoderate.”

Jon does not need to ask what those plans are, cannot even pretend he hadn’t expected her to suggest—and fully intend to carry out—her last resort in a war she could have easily won, had she unsheathed her weapons when she first set foot on the land her ancestors had taken, blood-soaked and fire-spitting and ruthless.

“Goodnight, my lord,” Jon says.

 

 

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He sucks in a breath when he finds her.

She is seated by the window, her back turned from him, the coruscating blades of light coming from the long windows illuminating the cavernous, large bedroom. They are splashed against the walls and onto the ground, distorted shapes sprawled over hard rock and cherrywood, and she remains immobile, regardless of his presence.

The air is glacial inside, the wind erupting from the long, narrow windows causing the curtains to wave unsteadily, soaring high above the walls, block of stones permeated with the coldness of the night. Several plates of decomposing, untouched food are strewn about on a table nearby, flies hovering around it with a soft buzz, picking at meat and fruits and cheese, but Daenerys pays no mind to that, no more than she answers when his pleading voice bids her to talk to him.

Jon exhales a breath of flashing frustration, repeats her name, and waits.

It's only as he approaches her that she slowly swivels to meet his gaze, charcoal-black dress cutting into the determined arch of her shoulders, spine straight, and vacant eyes circled by dark rings. She looks uncharacteristically fragile—breakable, exhausted, dead—with her hands clasped firmly on her lap and her naturally pale skin ashen, her chapped lips a pallid pink, her hair hanging limply around her neck where she wears no jewels or scarf.

He only caught a glimpse of the ghost she has become as she lit up the fire that burned her dearest friend and advisor, but something has splintered in her this time, something she can’t replace, buried in the knots of her dangling blue veins, throbbing with her pulse.

His heart constricts in his chest, her name escaping him in a jagged breath. “I’m sorry. Missandei was a good woman, intelligent and loyal,” he starts, and stops, suddenly unsure, struck by the futility of it all. There are no condolences able to abate the loss, no cure to heal and put back together the bludgeoned fragments of the woman she was. She is a deformed mosaic of sorrow, soiled dignity and mangled dreams, soul brimming with the unfairness of it all.

“I should never have let her come with me,” Daenerys says, voice clipped and raspy from being unused too long. She gulps back the misery—the guilt—her swollen eyes cannot hide, and whirls to the thin window again, her moonlit profile turned to him, his presence once more ignored.

He would feel the sting of refection at being dismissed, if there wasn’t the certitude that it is grief, naked and cruel and gnawing at her that makes her behave so. He remembers learning about Robb, about the Red Wedding, throat closed in pain, so tight he could barely breathe. He understands.

“It was her choice,” he reminds her, glad she is not looking at him, for she would see the guilt shimmering in his eyes. He once questioned it, had considered Missandei’s scorn for their customs and her belief in the absolute freedom her queen was supposedly granting her to be foolish, to say the least.

“I am aware.” Almost defiantly, she finally raises her head, locking her eyes with his, sardonic mirth glinting behind those bloodshot eyes. “I knew her before you did, Jon. It was her decision to follow me, to stay faithful to me as a friend and that dragged her into chains once more. She was a mere pawn for Cersei; an attack against me, a grand show of power. And that is how she died, as an insignificant propriety, away from her lover and friends, after she lost her acquaintances in a war that wasn’t theirs.”

Her voice cracks at the end and he crosses the distance between them in a few steps, lays a hand on her shoulder, tries not to wince as she flinches away from him. She still refuses to look at him, sewn in darkness, and he decides he is not so selfless as to let her be and come back on the morrow. He needs some reassurances, even if he has to pry it from her unrelentingly distant hands.

“What is home to you, Jon?”

Home is Winterfell.

It’s the days spent playfully sparring with Robb with their boots plodding in snow, their easy camaraderie and affection, the knowing smiles and inside jokes shared between him and Arya, the evenings listening to Old Nan's stories by the fireplace with Bran and Sansa, any distance between them forgotten in the comforting heat found on cold evenings, and Rickon's broad, cheerful smile when Jon would give him sweets after making him promise not to tell Lady Stark.

Home is something that has crumbled to the ground and can’t be rebuilt for it was never made of stones and bricks.

“I do not know anymore,” he says honestly.

 

 

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She has been wrenched out of every protection she had, stripped to her frail skeleton, exposed, vulnerable. Her bones are chipped, frail like twigs, no longer the glimmering horns she walked out of a deadly pyre with. There had been magic in the pyre, something primeval in the flames that licked her skin and infused life where sat death, soot had lingered on her unburnt skin and power has clung to her like tiny black stars.

She had recounted it to him one night, both lounging with their back against the soft mattress, panting and sated as the boat rocked them gently. Her voice had been a whisper tickling the crook of his neck, the tale most knew feeling like a secret with dusk closing around them.

“You will catch your death of cold,” he says, once the silence has become solid, cumbersome.

He closes each window with a resounding clatter, half-expecting her to snap an imperious demand, relief and concern coalescing into one when she doesn’t even glower.

“I used to think this was home,” she says, voice nearly spectral. “I used to think that the land of my ancestors would give me strength, that my people were waiting for me, that the throne was my right, that I would reforge a legacy people would remember after my death. I was wrong. The Dothrakis were the blood of my blood and it was in the sand of the desert that I found my strength. I was meet with resistance in Meereen and Astapor but the people loved me and respected me. They wanted me to be their queen and believed in my justice. I broke the wheel they were chained to and they accepted my rule. I had three dragons, three children, who flew in the sky, and when they did, even non-believers would stop and admire until the clouds would coat them. My advisors trusted me, and when they advised me, it was in my best interest. They sought out fairness, not self-advancement. And I was their queen of choice, not the lesser of two evils. Now—”

Now she is a queen in name only, barely recognized as such on this side of the sea, gathering scathing sideways glances of suspicion and disdain. The people do not want her, do not trust her, and her enemies are circling her and wounding her at every turn.

“Now I see coming back was a grave mistake. I’ve lost my children. I’ve lost my people. I’ve lost my friends and confidants. And I might be losing my mind too, according to my advisors. It is foul counsel they give me, yet they judge me brash for not heeding their instructions.”

Jon is all too aware her disappointment encompasses him too, for everything he is and everything he is not, for his rigid beliefs and honor, taught from boyhood and persisting into manhood, engraved in his bones.

They are stubborn creatures, the two of them, willing to compromise only to a certain extent, and yet it seems it is all they do, as of late, leaving each other in pieces they have to pick up in the aftermath of their concessions. There is a limit to what they are willing to surrender.

 

 

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The kiss surprises him more than her.

She accepts and welcomes her desires with ease when he tries to at least dilute them, she bites his bottom lip when he aims for tenderness despite his own cravings, opens her mouth in a thrilling invitation he can only accept, his heart hammering, slashing wildly as his tongue strokes hers.

There’s no finesse in it and he realizes that is exactly how she wants it, his fingers digging into her hipbone until he hears her gasping in unmistakable pain. But she doesn’t let him pull away, places his hand back where it rested and gives a permissive squeeze. She wants it hard. She wants a distraction. She wants to forget.

A faint blush darkens her cheeks when they finally break the contact of their lips and he struggles to find his elusive breath, fingers trailing from her delicate neck up to her cheeks and finally clenching into her silver curls, his need coiling beneath his ribcage.

A rush of blood courses to his groin, the stab of disgust that pierces him expected this time, and ignored, as he presses his lips to hers once more. He will be ashamed of his weakness in the morning, once the satisfaction is abated, her blood too tightly tied to his to let him make peace with what he wants, but not now.

She walks him backwards to the bed, brunches up her dress over her thighs and straddles his hips, slants her mouth against his once more. She rubs herself up and down against him and he clutches her waist, forgets everything except her, licks the column of her throat and feels the curve of her breast. He flips her on her back and kisses her—harder, deeper, more more more, just like she asks him once they are naked, a tangle of limbs and heated flesh, before she falls apart beneath him and he empties himself in her.

Everything burns.

 

 

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She is still with him and yet already gone when he wakes up to the feel her body writhing, his arm still draped across her stomach, his head tucked under her chin.

“Guilty,” she declares the punishment to the ceiling, which blinks down at her with the first speckles of the morning sun. “All of them. Euron Greyjoy. Cersei and her hand, the soldiers and the bystanders, the men and women who lurked in the shadows and watched—They all sent her to her death, and for that, there shall be no trial, and I shall hear no supplications. They shall burn for their crimes, shackled and helpless as she was. They will choke on their blood, first, and then I will submerge them in fire until even their marrow melt. Only when I walk into their ashes, I will be satisfied.”

He was wrong. Jon knows it as he sits up, looks down into violet eyes and see no gashes there. Her eyes are tears-spotted, the faces of too many ghosts enshrined in them, but focused and persistent. He has believed her on the cusp of collapsing, but she wasn’t. She was wallowing in her rage, basking in the filth of her own grief until it became steel she could wield. Something shattered in her, probably, but not how he imagined it.

Her instinct to falling is to arise and stand taller, bolder, harsher. She wouldn't have survived so long if she hadn't learned how to turn her heart blacker and blacker and hardens her veins until those were thin thorns, resilient and lethal.

“Dany,” he says, or he thinks he says it. In truth it is only air propelled from his lungs, a plea not fully articulated on his tongue. “Dany,” he tries again. “Cersei, Euron, The Mountain, the soldiers—they shall pay. But your quarrel is with them and them alone.”

The casualties will be impossible to avoid, the cost always higher than the spoils of war, but he cannot knowingly feed innocents to the fire of her revenge. Jon burns. Jon always did. Jon isn't like her, the dragon queen who proudly wears her name like her dragons wore their thick skin, and his flesh blisters, welts and melts, his wounds red and shiny and wet and disgusting and human. He is ice—all his mother, none of his father—and she is a flame he keeps touching, and he doesn’t have to think to know how this will end, the time he could convince himself he was only playing with fire long gone. There are only so many searing coals ice can withstand before it thaws and dissolves.

“Do you love me, Jon?”

 _Yes_ , he almost tells her. His empty chest was torn open and in its pit she slotted, nestled in the coldness where her strength and her courage and kindness warmed him, hooked into the curve of his pulsing heart. It was a balm first, a rupturing rapture after, then a bruise he felt aching to his sinews, and a torment in the end. She ruined him—inadvertently, unwillingly, unintentionally, that woman who tried to protect him with everything she had, even when she had no reasons to—and he ruined her—by mistake, on a surge of good intentions, his negligence haphazardly cutting when he had never meant to hurt—and here they are, standing in the wreck of their love like so many before them.

 _I love you_ , he wants to admit the truth, but it would be breathing a permission into her ears, giving his tacit approval to what is bound to follow. _I love you_ means _I will always love you, even with crimson pouring onto your skin and death festering in your bosom. I love you and nothing will change that._ But many other things can. What shape would he take after he had bent himself and his values for her, love and duty crisscrossing in a noose that could destroy him if he let it, wrapped firmly around his throat?

He can’t say it.

The thrum of their breathing is loud in the room, the space riddled with every mistake they made.


End file.
